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Hey Dear members … we are glad to announce our 1st Challenge
In ANS CHALLENGE SERIES
The first challenge will be an "open theme" wallpaper challenge

Winner will have :
winning Piece shown on the ANS Home Page until the following challenge take place
Name written on “ANS HALL OF FAME” with a link to his winning wall
And sure a badge on his wall page as the winner in ANS Challenge

Can’t wait to see all your great designs ……. ;)

for more info & Confirming participating www.artnskins.net

DuroBlend is a one-of-a-kind windows class library which provides software developers and user interface designers with a fast, intuitive, unique, aesthetically pleasing, and altogether seamless alternative to the bland Windows XP user interface. Not only does DuroBlend work on both XP and Vista, but it also allows developers to integrate some of the advanced user interface capabilities of Windows vista applications on the more popular and generally stable XP operating system. DuroBlend lets developers construct alpha-channel-aware, completely translucent user interfaces comprised mainly of PNG files. Because DuroBlend is a class library, it is really an unlocked widget engine - It has all the powerful features of the generic widget engines, like DesktopX and Yahoo Widgets (in fact, DuroBlend has several extra graphical features these engines are lacking), but instead of taking these features and locking them down under a draconian scripting library and enforcing the use of a client .exe file, DuroBlend lets .NET developers access all of its core functions from the IDE of their choice.

more info: [ link ]

Cerulean Studios has updated their popular instant messenger software Trillian.

What to do when the devs say it will be released shortly, but it can already be found elsewhere?

Have you ever wanted to pick an exact hue from an image, to know what the exact color information of a certain pixel is? ColorPic 3 to the rescue! Click for more.

Rest of post at deviantart: [ link ]

Ever wanted to have your machine look like a Mac, without actually getting one? Rejoice! ObjectDock brings one element from OSX' interface to the win32 platform, the much loathed dock. Ergo, a tabbed app launcher annex taskbar, which can auto-hide and has icons that grow and shrink when you hover your mouse over it. Ooooh!

Rest of post at teknidermy: [ link ]

Contemplicity brushes off the dust and resurrects itself with its third release, Seasons.

Rest of post at deviantart: [ link ]

Mozilla Thunderbird 0.7.1 is a fast, efficient mail and news client based on the mail/news segment of the Mozilla suite. Building on the improvements found in the 0.7 milestone (the introduction of the Themes and Extensions managers, smaller download package, noticeable performance) this update addresses flaws in the extension system alongside minor bugs. Thunderbird is a practical, free alternative to email and newsgroup clients such as Microsoft Outlook.

Rest of post at deviantart: [ link ]

Mozilla Firefox 0.9.1 is a swift, feature-rich web browser with excellent compliance for standards. Sporting popup blocking, tabbed browsing, an integrated Download manager, integrated Google search, support for themes and a host of other features, Firefox will revolutionise your browsing experience. This release introduces a new navigation menu icon set, puts right flaws in the Extension manager, and addresses a number of minor bugs.

Rest of post at deviantart: [ link ]

ZDNet has an awesome video showing off what Microsoft has in store for digital photography.

Tag, sort and share digital photos with a few clicks

Digital photography is easy until it comes to sorting, labeling and deciding how to share the pictures. Microsoft researcher Steven Drucker shows correspondent James Hilliard the software maker's Photo Triage, a project from the research labs in Redmond that uses the metadata of digital photos to organize and display them across a variety of electronic devices.



Rest of post at neowin: [ link ]

Alienware has issued a statement towards yesterday?s announcement of Nvidia's SLI. If in fact Nvidia's SLI is faster than Alienware's VideoArray, the company is willing to swallow its pride to offer SLI. Still you have to wonder how much money Alienware has put into its VideoArray technology.

?Should Nvidia?s SLI technology ultimately prove faster than Alienware?s Video Array, we will offer it to our customers as soon as it becomes commercially available,? stated Frank Azor, senior vice-president and general manager of Alienware?s Worldwide Product Group. ?Either way, we will continue to develop and optimize Video Array for all non-Nvidia graphics solutions, such as those from ATI, 3D Labs, Matrox, and any other manufacturers. Our sole interest is in offering technology that provides the very best computing experience possible to Alienware customers.?



Rest of post at neowin: [ link ]

Bill Gates has issued a report on the current status of stopping SPAM made by Microsoft. Already steady progress has been made from the deployment of SmartScreen (Microsoft spam-filtering technology). That's present in MSN 8, MSN Premium, MSN Hotmail, and Outlook 2003. Still this isn't enough as Bill Gates reviews alternatives to fighting SPAM.

I'd like to update you on the progress that Microsoft and our industry are making to curb the epidemic of junk email. Since I sent a message to customers on this subject a year ago, we've made significant advances against spam. It's still a major problem ? an invasion of privacy, a costly drain on time and resources and, as a carrier of worms and viruses, a significant threat to computer security. The good news is that billions of junk emails are being blocked every day, and spamming has become a more difficult and less rewarding business.

Much of the improvement Microsoft customers have experienced so far has resulted from broad deployment of SmartScreen, our advanced spam-filtering technology. SmartScreen has provided a significant benefit to users of MSN 8 and MSN Premium, MSN Hotmail and Outlook 2003. Since Hotmail deployed it six months ago, SmartScreen has been blocking more than 95 percent of all incoming spam ? an average of nearly 3 billion messages every day. Because we believe that SmartScreen is crucial to the war against spam, we recently began making it available free to all users of Exchange Server 2003, via a download of the Exchange Intelligent Message Filter from [ link ] www.microsoft.com/exchange .



Rest of post at neowin: [ link ]